


And So It Goes

by thegraytigress



Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe, The Avengers (Marvel Movies)
Genre: Angst, Bucky Barnes Needs a Hug, Bucky Barnes Remembers, Drama, Hurt Bucky Barnes, Hurt Steve Rogers, Hurt/Comfort, M/M, Period-Typical Homophobia, Post-Captain America: Civil War (Movie), Steve Rogers Needs a Hug
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-14
Updated: 2016-08-14
Packaged: 2018-08-08 15:21:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 19,082
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7762963
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/thegraytigress/pseuds/thegraytigress
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Bucky makes a choice.  It hurts.  It hurts more than anything he's ever known, and he's lived a lifetime of pain.  But it's the best choice he can make, and it's his choice.  <i>His.</i>  He knows what he has to do.</p><p>Keep Steve safe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	And So It Goes

**Author's Note:**

> **DISCLAIMER:** _Captain America: Civil War_ and _The Avengers_ are the properties of Walt Disney Studios, Paramount Studios, and Marvel Studios. This work was created purely for enjoyment. No money was made, and no infringement was intended.
> 
>  **RATING:** M (for language, violence, adult situations)
> 
>  **AUTHOR'S NOTE:** This is my first foray into Stucky. It's dark, angsty, and not quite a fix-it (but I think it's in tune with _Civil War_ , at least). Lots of playing with dreams, memories, and flashbacks. I hope you enjoy, and thanks for reading!

The force of winter pushes them back, but that doesn’t stop Steve.  It never has, and it never will.  “Come on, Buck,” he gasps, tightening his grip on Bucky.  Bucky’s beaten badly, barely conscious, barely hanging on.  Steve is, too, but he doesn’t let go no matter how much it hurts.  He never has, and _he never will._   “Buck…  Hold on.  We’re going to be alright.”

_It’s alright._

Steve drags Bucky with him as he limps out of the bunker.  Everything has that sort of surreal blurriness to it that reminds Steve of waking up from a nightmare.  Things don’t look quite real, and sounds feel like they’ve been stretched far and distorted.  They’re both dripping blood into the snow, turning fresh white red, and the cold wind bites and pulls at already tender skin and cuts and bruises.  Steve tightens his grip on Bucky’s wrist and pulls him up firmer to his side.  Against his arm around Bucky’s waist and hip, there’s nothing.  Nothing because Bucky’s metal arm is _gone_ , blown away by Iron Man, _destroyed,_ and Bucky’s drifting in shock.  His eyes are half-lidded.  His face is a mess of blood and grime.  He’s gone, too, and Steve’s trying not to let that scare him.  “You with me?” he asks once he gets a deeper breath into his chest.  Christ, it hurts.  He’s had busted up ribs enough in his life – so many goddamn times – that he knows _exactly_ what it feels like.  This time is really bad.  “Buck?”

Bucky sags as they walk deeper into the snow around the bunker.  “Steve…”

Steve has to stop a moment.  Frozen rocks surround the open doors, and he leans on some to catch his wind better.  He tastes blood in the back of his throat, figures he’s probably got a messed up lung.  That and a concussion.  His cheek is absolutely throbbing; Stark hit him hard enough there to crack the bone.  His chest is burning where Tony shot him with the repulsor.  And his belly.  And his back.  Every single thing hurts and not just because Iron Man packed a serious punch.  He feels like if he stops to think about what just happened, he’ll fall and fall hard.  _I should have told him truth._   He’s thinking that, and he knows it’s right, but even if he had…  _He tried to kill Bucky._   Not just kill.  Murder out of vengeance for crimes that Bucky couldn’t have stopped himself from committing.  And Tony didn’t listen.  Not about Ultron or the Avengers or the million and one times the two of them butted heads before.  Not about Zemo.  Not about the Accords.  Not even when Steve told him that his parents’ murders weren’t Bucky’s fault (even if he’s not sure of that.  It’s _not_ Bucky’s fault, but it happened all the same, and – _damn it all to hell_ – there’s no good answer here).  Tony didn’t listen to any of that.  He _never_ listened.  Why should this time have been any different?

It doesn’t matter.  What’s done is done.  At this point, he needs to get Bucky out of here before Tony calls in Ross or anyone else to come and arrest him or finish him off.  _Shoot on sight._   Steve closes his eyes a moment and wonders why no one _cares._   Again, that doesn’t matter, but it hurts, too, hurts just as bad as all the blows Tony landed on him, as every wound on his body.  He feels his anger mount, and his faith is shaking, trembling as hard as he is in the frigid air and cold wind.  He has to focus.  _Get out of here._   “We have to go,” he murmurs, looking around, blinking to clear his hazy vision and squinting through the snow and wind.

Bucky’s not with it to offer much help.  He’s gone so limp that Steve turns back to him only to see him sag into the rocks.  Steve lurches forward to grab him before he falls, snatching the black fabric of his jacket and lifting him closer.  “Buck?  Hey.”  He cups Bucky’s face, bites his lip so hard it hurts, too.  One more little pain on a mountain of agony.  “Bucky.  Come on.  Open your eyes.”

Bucky’s eyes flutter open, grayish blue beneath heavy lids, the same grayish blue that’s haunted Steve’s dreams since 1945.  He’s dreamed about those eyes bright with laughter, dark with worry, harsh with violence, empty, _so goddamn empty_.  Now they’re filled with tears.  “Steve…”

“I gotta get you out of here,” Steve breathes.  Maybe if he keeps saying it, he’ll find a way.

Bucky’s lips, split and red, curl into that smile of his that reminds Steve of Brooklyn dance halls and sharing a stolen beer on top of their old apartment building and proud, knowing eyes and sitting too close together…  As close as they are now.  “’s my job.”  He slurs his words something awful.

Steve laughs a little.  “Well, this time it’s mine.  You always got us home.  ’Bout time I return the favor.”

Bucky stares at him, still just a shadow of who he was, who he was even a few minutes ago before he watched himself murder Howard and Maria Stark.  What he doesn’t say is clear.  _We don’t have a home._   Steve doesn’t acknowledge that, pulling Bucky closer and into his embrace.  He holds him, mindful of the still smoldering stump where Bucky’s arm used to be.  He can’t make himself look at it.  How that arm was such a symbol of HYDRA’s wrath.  That arm firing a gun.  Stabbing with a wicked knife.  Punching with so much violence and strength.

Reaching down through the water to save Steve’s life.  “I got you,” Steve promises.  He feels Bucky shiver, though whether from the cold or pain or something else, he doesn’t know.  “I got you.”   It’s hard to move away from this.  The hug is so familiar, even as damaged as they both are.  Familiar and true and right.  Bucky’s got his good arm around Steve’s neck, and Steve has both his curling around Bucky’s back, and if they freeze right here with the snow blowing and the cold wind slicing and winter pushing them down, at least they’ll be together.

Steve’s not going to let that happen.  He leans back, cupping Bucky’s bloodied face again, not caring at all about the mess of blood or the tears that are finally leaking from Bucky’s eyes.  Bucky stares, stares like he’s been doing so much these last few days since Steve finally found him.  The wheels in his head are turning, like he’s trying to reconcile things.  What he remembers with that he sees.  Steve wants to push, wants to ask him what he’s thinking, wants to tell him everything.

Not here.  Not now.

“Come on,” he breathes instead, taking Bucky’s good arm anew and getting it over his shoulders.  He tries to straighten his posture to take Bucky’s weight off the rocks, but it’s hard and his damaged chest and abdomen don’t cooperate.  He sucks in a whistling breath and _makes_ himself do it, and a few seconds later, they’re shuffling away.  There’s a rattle behind them, and Steve’s actually afraid, afraid of Tony and what he left behind and what’s going to happen now.

His arm feels different without his shield on it.  Lighter and heavier all at once.

Ahead he sees the quinjet, idle and waiting with its wings folded up.  He’s so rattled by everything that’s happened that it didn’t occur to him until now: they can take the jet to escape.  Fly out of here.  Go anywhere in the world.  With the jet’s stealth tech, they’ll be able to escape detection, hide wherever they want.  It’s so tempting that he feels nauseous with desire.  Bucky stumbles against him, coughing, and a splatter of blood lands in the snow at their feet.  That only stokes Steve’s panic.  They need to get out of here.

But not with the jet.  He pulled the Avengers’ badges off the shoulders of his uniform when he went after Bucky in the wake of the UN bombing.  Stood alone in the hotel room in London and just ripped them off.  His uniform’s made to withstand or mitigate unbelievable forces, knives and bullets, heat and ice and water.  The patches came off easy, though, and in hindsight that seems pretty prophetic.  Tony made their gear, made their tech, used his fortune to fund the Avengers, but he never batted an eye about what any of it meant.  He treated them all like these things you can just slap a brand on.  _The Avengers._   Nothing to it.  Stick an “A” on there and they’re a team.

Only people don’t work that way.  And Steve ripped the “A” off his shoulder and threw his shield down and _walked away_.  He blames Tony.  Blames himself, too.  He’s bitter and angry and so hurt but not enough of any of those things to steal that jet.  Not this time.  So he doesn’t consider it beyond a second or two and pulls Bucky to the side where there’s a truck of sorts.  It’s not much more than a cab on top of two treads like the kind that tanks have, made specifically for rolling through snow.  He noticed it before when they arrived and figured that was how Zemo got here.  Maybe it can get them out.  Steve can get Bucky up there, and they can go someplace far away, far from the snow and ice that always seems to find them. 

“Almost there, Buck,” he huffs with sudden energy and hope.  He almost feels delirious with it; it has to be that and now the concussion and the screwed up lung and the blood he keeps swallowing.  If they can get away, leave this behind…  Everything will be okay.  It’ll hurt.  It already does.  But they can be together.  Bucky is there, solid against him, unconscious but warm and alive, and Steve knows they can find a way.  They always have.  Always will.  _Almost there._

* * *

_You’re Steve._

Bucky keeps thinking that.  His brain keeps supplying the information – the facts – every time he sees Steve’s face.  _You’re Steve Rogers.  Steven Grant.  Stevie._ Little Steve Rogers, skinnier and scrawnier than he is now.  Sicker than he is now.  There are other facts, too.  _Your mom’s name was Sarah.  Your dad was Joseph but he died in the war.  We lived in the same building growing up.  You were dirt poor.  You used to wear newspapers in your shoes and draw pictures for my sisters and sleep on the floor in the living room on the couch cushions.  You never wore pomade – hated the stuff – and liked hot dogs and got yourself into fights left and right.  Blond hair._   He has wisps of thoughts about that, soft like Steve’s blond hair is.  It used to be floppier and longer, and he’s sure he _knows_ how it feels between his fingers even though he’s not sure he’s ever touched it.  Steve’s hair is shorter, but his eyes are just as blue.  _Blue eyes._ The same blue eyes as the man in the museum, the man on the bridge, his mission, limp and pliant and dying underneath him and telling him to _do it._   Finish him off, because _I’m with you till the end of the line._   The same face that has filled his memories since he’s had memories.  _Steve._

“Bucky?”

He’s been drifting.  He does that a lot.   His memories come, and they’re pretty random.  It’s hard to make sense of them.  He has Bucky’s memories.  He has the Winter Soldier’s memories.  He has his own memories, whoever he is.  One or the other.  Both.  Neither.  He doesn’t know. 

But he knows Steve.  Even when he didn’t know himself, when he pulled them both from the river and dropped his severely injured target on the bank and watched the water spill from his mouth and his eyelids flutter and new breath fill his lungs…  _Failed his mission._   Failed because his mission was _Steve._   His friend.  His…  There’s a flash of something behind his eyelids, something that he hasn’t recalled until now, and all sorts of phantom feelings come from his missing arm.  Steve’s body, small and frail but with so much spit and sass, and Bucky’s hand was flat on the pale flesh of a chest full of bruises and broken baby bird bones.  Steve’s body, big and strong now, and Bucky’s hand flat on a chest that’d put those Greek gods in Mr. Keller’s old book shop to shame.  His hand flat on Steve’s chest, over a star that he _should have recognized_ sooner, and those metal fingers slide up to squeeze and choke and kill…

None of that’s real.  _My goddamn arm’s been blown off again._   Bucky giggles at that, even though he’s remembering lying on a cold table, too sick to struggle even as men – Zola – touch him and torture him and prepare him to be the new fist of HYDRA as they’re so fond of saying.  He’s so goddamn _sure_ his left arm’s tied down at the wrist like his right is.  And he’s so sure now that Steve’s leaning over him, worry deep in his eyes.  Bucky’s touching Steve’s face with his left hand, thumb on Steve’s lower lip, pulling him close…  Funny how losing this arm now is like losing it the first time, even though the cybernetic arm HYDRA gave him didn’t have the level of sensory input that his flesh and blood one did.  He could feel pressure, heat, cold, some sort of information wired into his brain that told him something was soft or hard or resisting or not…  Input devoid of human connection.  Still, that information’s coming even though the arm’s gone.  Steve’s lips are soft, plush and pliant, not resisting, and his skin is smooth and warm.  And he’s not sure what this is.  A memory?  A dream?  He’s never touched Steve like this…  Has he?

“Buck, look at me.”

Bucky gets his eyes open, his brain sluggishly coming around.  This happens sometimes, particularly in that place between sleep and wakefulness where all sorts of crazy, disjointed (and sometimes impossible) shit comes out of his head.  HYDRA’s programming is wearing off in fits and spurts, although, when he can be objective about it, he knows he’s gotten better.  It’s damn hard to be objective though, when your mind continually feels like it belongs to two entirely different people and there’s no way to make one surrender control to the other.  HYDRA’s fucking control, the things he knows he went through but can’t make himself acknowledge, the life he _knows_ was his back in Brooklyn seventy years ago, the life he lives now…  It’s an unending war, and he just wants it to stop.

“Buck, please…”

There’s the constant, though.  _Steve._

And Steve really is leaning over him.  His blond hair falls over his brow, dark with sweat and streaked with red.  His face is beat to hell, blood on the lips that Bucky thought he touched, blood on his cheeks, blood weeping from a cut on his brow.  His blue eyes are wide and teary and filled with fear.  “Buck?”

Bucky shuts his eyes again against the pain pounding in his skull.  Fuck, it’s agony.  His arm’s gone.  _His arm’s gone._   It’s pulsing, fiery, and he clenches his teeth and tries to breathe through it.  A warm palm falls over his forehead, soothing.  Somehow he hears Steve’s soft voice.  “Sorry, Buck.  Sorry.”  He doesn’t know why Steve’s apologizing – _not his fault my fault he lost his friend because of me I’m sorry_ – but he can’t get a decent breath to ask until the misery recedes a bit.  There are times he misses being the Winter Soldier.  HYDRA’s programming, the torture and the conditioning and the _treatments_ …  All of that had been to force him to serve, yes, but it had advantageous side-effects.  Like learning to ignore pain.  He’s out of practice after two years of being human again and not a machine.

But he gets through it.  And when he opens his eyes this time, he doesn’t feel quite so much like he’s going to puke.  It seems like a lot of time has passed, but Steve’s still right there, leaning over him, one hand on his forehead and the other on his chest.  Another memory slashes through his head, one of his hands on Steve’s rail-thin chest, fingers of one slotting between too-prominent ribs, the other over Steve’s sternum and holding Steve upright over a pan of steaming water he just boiled, holding him close and rubbing gently and he’s saying over and over again, _“Just breathe, Steve.  Breathe.  In and out.  Come on, pal.  You can do this…”_

“Bucky, God, say somethin’…”

“Steve?”

Steve’s face melts in relief, like he was worried Bucky was gone again inside HYDRA’s triggers.  Bucky’s sad to admit he has good cause to be concerned.  He swallows down his nausea and blinks a few tears free.  “Where’re we?”

“Not sure,” Steve replies.  Bucky grimaces as he pushes himself up with his good arm.  Steve immediately tries to take his weight and help him sit up.  They’re in a room, shoddy and smaller than their old place back in Brooklyn.  There’s a bed that’s hardly more than a cot where he’s lying and a bathroom.  The walls are run-down brown paneling.  The floor is tan carpet but tattered.  There’s a window, but the curtains are tightly drawn.  The gray light of evening is still bleeding through them.  Steve sighs.  “About sixty miles east of the bunker.  Drove us most of the way, but there wasn’t enough gas so I did the last leg walking.”

Bucky doesn’t remember any of that.  And that probably explains why Steve looks like death warmed over.  _Fucking hell._   There’s something protective inside him that’s gotten louder and more pressing since Steve showed up at his little hellhole of a place in Bucharest.  Something that’s demanding, that goes down into the core of him, and he doesn’t quite know what it is but it’s got something to do with Steve and making sure Steve’s okay.  That he’s safe.  Carrying Bucky’s dead weight for miles in the blustery snow does not equate to either of those things.

He doesn’t know how to act on what he feels, though, and he’s in a pretty sorry state himself.  He glances at his arm, the charred stump black and undeniable.  His arm’s not there no matter how much he thinks it is.  His brain can’t seem to process that, but his brain doesn’t process much nowadays the way it should, hence his backpack and his notebooks.  Thoughts that come and details he remembers and things he knows are right.  Without the backpack, his life organized on pages with pictures taped and glued in and things jotted down in handwriting he doesn’t recognize, he feels useless and incomplete, even more so than he feels just without his arm.

But Steve’s staring at him with nothing but sincere relief, and he knows he needs to be that Bucky, whoever Steve thinks Bucky was and is.  He told Zemo his name’s Bucky, but that’s a far cry from actually knowing what that means.  He breathes through the pain, and that shattered feeling he thought he escaped months ago is pawing at the edges of his control.  “We safe here?” he finally asks in a rough, small voice.

Blearily Steve glances around the little hovel.  “Safe enough, I think,” he answers.  His eyes aren’t focusing right.  He’s shaking.  Bucky notices that now, notices the fresh blood on the side of Steve’s mouth that he doesn’t think was there before.  The serum – _that’s what it is.  The super soldier serum_ – should be healing the cuts on his face already.  _Target possess increased strength, speed, and a regenerative healing factor.  Employ maximum force.  Eliminate at all costs._ Christ, that comes before he can stop it, and it leaves him reeling a moment.  Steve’s talking, and he tries to focus better.  “There’s a town here.  Got us this room.  Nobody asked any questions.  We can’t stay here, though.  You need a doctor.”

Bucky swallows through a dry throat.  “So do you.”

“’m okay.”

That he remembers really clearly.  Steve’s fucking selfless, stupid, blind to just how hurt he is.  How many times did Steve drag himself home, covered in blood and bruises he swore were nothing and hiding damaged bones like Bucky wouldn’t notice how he couldn’t straighten his torso or extend his arm all the way?  Bucky always noticed, and it always pissed himself off something fierce.  He feels that now, the sharp, frustrated anger, and it’s almost welcomed against the deadened apathy in which he’s been drowning for forever.  “You’re not okay.  He beat the shit out of you.”

“I’m okay,” Steve says more forcefully, but he’s trembling more and bearing less of Bucky’s weight.

Bucky grits his teeth.  “No, you’re not.  Don’t lie, for Christ’s sake!”  Steve says nothing, shaking harder.  Before Bucky was so deep in shock that he couldn’t focus enough to see, but now he can, and Steve really does look like hell.  Serum or no serum, it’s serious.  His face is battered badly.  He got his uniform top off while Bucky was out, and there’s a huge, bloody, burned spot on the right side of his chest, the blackened area stark against the gray shirt he has on.  There are other wet, red splotches as well, and he’s bent in a way that suggests he’s got internal injuries.  Bucky knows a lot about a man’s anatomy: where to strike to kill, to debilitate, to cause pain, to incapacitate while leaving a victim capable of speaking for the purposes of interrogation or torture.  Steve’s wheezing damply, face white around the blood, lips a little blue beneath it.  He’s probably got a punctured lung.

And he’s ignoring it.  Bucky can’t stand it.  The anger is dashing that apathy, burning it away, and his eyes sting as he pulls free and takes it all in.  All the evidence of _what he’s done._   It’s not like he doesn’t know.  He wasn’t lying to Stark; _he remembers all of them._ All the people he was sent to kill, to kidnap, to torture and make vanish.  All the people whose lives he ruined.  He remembers them.  He _knows_ what he did.  But he’s seeing it now, seeing it in a way that he hasn’t before.  Steve’s wearing his sins, the evil he’s done, in the pain bending him over and the blood covering his clothes and the sense of loss in his eyes.  Even on the helicarrier, it didn’t mean this much.  It didn’t make him _feel_ this guilty.  Steve promised back in the jet that he could face it, the hell of Bucky’s crimes.  So confident.  So damn _sure._

Bucky’s not sure.  He doesn’t want to cause any more pain, though.  Not to anyone.  But definitely not to Steve.  “I told you.  I’m not worth this.”

Steve with his goddamn determination.  That hasn’t changed.  It’s like a shield, _his shield,_ and he uses it to push through anything the world throws at him, to fight through _anything_ to do the right thing.  “And I told you I can handle it.”

Bucky looks away.  The ugly, threadbare bedding on the cot is fraying and stained, and it blurs as his eyes fill with tears.  His memories are so damn scattered and useless, and he can’t remember if he’s cried since he escaped.  Detachment is _his_ shield, and he uses it to survive.  Nothing more than that.  He thinks Steve’s Bucky would do more.  He wonders if that Bucky would cry.  Probably.  That feeling inside him tethered to Steve…  It’s throbbing bad.  “You shouldn’t have to.  Not for me.  I killed them.”

Steve’s eyes are wet with tears, too.  He grabs Bucky’s unhurt shoulder, grabs and holds tight just like he did on the jet.  Other things fill his eyes, too.  Things Bucky can’t understand.  “I know,” he says.

“Maybe you should’ve let him…”

“No.”

“Steve.”

 _“No.”_   Steve’s wheezing worse as he gets more agitated.  “It’s not right, Buck.  Tony wasn’t in his right mind.  Neither were you.  And if I have to walk away, I’ll walk away.  Whatever it takes.”

“You chose me over him,” Bucky insists.  He can’t believe how blind Steve is.  “He was your friend, and you threw that all away.  Threw down your shield.”  Most of the latter part of the fight with Iron Man is a blur of pain and shock, but he remembers that.  The clang of the vibranium on the ground, heavy with finality.  Steve averts his gaze.  He’s trembling harder, too, and Bucky can see him struggling to hang onto that certainty that seemed so infallible and unshakeable mere moments before.  That only frustrates him more.  “You threw everything away!”

“Christ, Bucky, I wasn’t going to stand there and let him kill you!”  Steve’s eyes are flashing, furious, frightened.  “I couldn’t let him do that!  He made his choice, too.  Tony’s always…”  He stops himself, shakes his head, wipes at his cheeks.  “He doesn’t listen.  He does what he wants.  Usually it’s for the best but not always.”

Bucky wavers through another burst of pain from his side, from his arm, and tries not to collapse.  “Eye for an eye,” he mutters before biting his lip until it’s red and raw just to keep from sobbing.

“Not if I can help it,” Steve says, more resolute again.  “I’m not sure what I believe in anymore.  I know I don’t believe in a government that arrests people without trial and locks up people they don’t understand and that would shoot an innocent man on sight.  I know I can’t stand still and do nothing when people need help just because someone above me is playing politics.  I know we need someone to help us do what we do, but I can’t _trust_ anymore.  I can’t follow along when the next HYDRA or SHIELD or World Security Council could be out there calling the shots.  Don’t you see?  This wasn’t just about you.”  Bucky may not know who he is and who Steve is to him and who he is to Steve, but he’s about ready to call bullshit on that.  He doesn’t though, and Steve keeps talking.  “This stopped being what I thought it was.  The Avengers were supposed to be different from SHIELD and HYDRA, and now we’re not.  We’re…”  He doesn’t say it, but it’s obvious.  _We’re tools.  Weapons.  No agency.  No free will._

_We’re you._

“I can’t go back,” Steve whispers.  “I can’t put on the uniform and pick up a shield and fight for any of that, Buck.  I just can’t.”

“But Stark–”

 _“He made his choice,”_ Steve says again.

“What about Sam and the others?  They make their choice?”

Steve shakes his head.  It’s the same damn answer, and he’s too beaten and wearied to make it seem strong.  “When we…  When we find a way out of this, I’ll take care of it.”

“I can’t watch you do this,” Bucky finally says.  It feels like running away, like admitting defeat.  For so long, he’s had no choices.  HYDRA took them all, _every fucking one_ , and even after he got away from them, he’s been living a life dictated for him.  A shadow.  A ghost.  Distant and insubstantial.  Do what he has to stay under radar, hiding and surviving and keeping all the awful shit away from him so it can’t suck him back into it.  Now he's here with Steve, and he _knows_ there’s something between Steve and that shield he threw away like it was nothing at all.  Something good and pure and intrinsic to who Steve is, and that’s the worst thing that’s been sacrificed for him.  “I can’t–”

“It’s done,” Steve whispers, blinking quickly.  He’s too weak to argue anymore, and when he coughs into his hand, his fingers come away red.  Stark nearly fucking murdered him, murdered them both, and none of that would have happened if not for Bucky.  Steve doesn’t see that, though, as he wipes his wet hand on his thigh and then wipes at his mouth, too.  “It’s done.  No going back.”

 _There never is._ Bucky shakes his head, squeezing his eyes shut.  He can see Iron Man’s glare, the blue glow of it, malignant and murderous.  He can feel Maria Stark’s pulse fluttering to its end under his fingertips.  He can see Howard’s face go lax with the dawning realization of who has come to kill him.  “It always ends in a fight,” he whispers.

They’re silent for a good long while.  The wind howls a little outside, blowing snow and ice probably.  Both of them shiver and struggle to breathe through the pain.  Steve coughs again, a deep hacking sound that shatters the quiet, and Bucky starts to wonder if Steve’s just plum crazy.  They’re both going to die here.  They’re broken and wounded.  Trapped in the middle of nowhere, buried in snow and ice, on the run from the government and friends turned enemies…  No help.  No hope.

After the vicious paroxysm, Steve sags, spent, falling back onto the cot.  Bucky watches him gaze up at the ceiling, eyes dark and dim with fading consciousness.  “Gonna get out of here,” he mumbles.  “Need a breather first.  Then we’ll keep going, huh?  Get out.  Get you somewhere safe.  Gotta be some place somewhere…”

 _There’s nowhere safe,_ Bucky thinks, but he doesn’t say it.  There’s another memory prodding at him.  Steve wheezing just like this, flushed with fever, staring with vacant eyes that were slipping into the shadow of death.  The smell of sickness was thick in the air, so heavy and smothering that Bucky couldn’t bear to breathe.  He was right there at Steve’s side, holding his hand, holding on tight, lifting it and kissing it, praying even though he stopped believing in God a long time ago.  _“Don’t you quit on me, Steve.  You hear me?  I can’t lose you.  Please, Steve, please hang on…”_

That thing inside him trembles.  “What wazzat your ma used to say?” Steve suddenly asks.  He’s blinking slowly, slurring badly, rasping.  “Always used to say it when things went wrong and there wasn’t anything to be done for it.”

Bucky thinks.  There’s more to that memory.  His mother’s warm arms, firm around him.  The way she always smelled like the kitchen and the coarse, worn gingham of her dress.  Bucky was seventeen and Steve was fifteen and dying of rheumatic fever, and it wasn’t fair.  Bucky went to her to cry because the doctor had come and gone and told Steve’s mother there was nothing more they could do.  No medicine.  No treatment or hospital.  Nothing to do but pray, but praying wasn’t working.  Ma squeezed him and shushed his sobs and said what she always said if there was nothing left but accepting the unacceptable.

He blinks.  “And so it goes,” he answers.

“Yeah, that was it,” Steve whispers.  His eyes are closed.  “And so it goes.  She always said that.”

Bucky can’t hold himself up anymore either, his own wounds too painful and consuming.  He falls back clumsily, trying to land on his good side.  Steve doesn’t react to him pressing close.  The cot’s too damn small for two super soldiers, but they make it work.  There are more memories, hazy things he thinks are good.  Sleeping like this in Brooklyn, in Germany, in Italy and France.  Side by side, spooned, Steve’s arms around him tight and comforting…  Now that he’s remembering that, he wonders how he survived so many nights alone on the run.  In DC.  In New York.  In Paris and Moscow and Bucharest.  The ache inside gets angry, swollen with unshed tears.  When he turns his face now, he’s close enough to Steve to kiss him.

But Steve’s already unconscious, breathing like each breath might be his last, and Bucky barely has a chance to wonder if he ever did kiss him before the shadows get too thick to see through any longer and he gives up the fight.

* * *

Bucky has dreams.  He has a lot of them.  They bleed out of him at night, seeping from his subconscious, and add awful context to the things he reads and sees and the little facts he writes down.  This is where he realizes how damaged he really is, where he sees the substance of what he’s become.  He fears his dreams.  Dreads them.  Hates them.

 _“The Winter Soldier is wanted for dozens of high profile assassinations, including that of SHIELD Director Nicholas J. Fury.”_   He dreams about a black SUV barreling down a city street, the weight of his gun in his hand and his mind running mechanically through the situation to determine the best way to make his kill. 

 _“We need you to reshape the future.”_ He dreams of lighted windows, of men laughing, sighting down his sniper rifle.  They had no idea the threat lurking in the shadows.  He killed them all and burned the building to the ground.

 _“Sergeant Barnes?”_   Howard’s face, older, a face that had lived his life.  It was full of blood, lax with horror, and the Asset punched it until his target was dead. 

 _“Best_ _friends since childhood, Bucky Barnes and Steven Rogers were inseparable on both schoolyard and battlefield.”_ Arm around Steve’s neck, laughing with him as they walk up to Ebbet’s Field for a day at the ball game.  _“Barnes is the only Howling Commando to give his life in service of his country.”_   The cold wind tearing at him, dragging him down, and he was falling, screaming, tumbling from a train and down into the mountains.  He never remembers what happened when he hit the rocks.

_“Prep him.  Wipe him and start over.”_

Hundreds of harsh hands, seventy years of them, forcing him down into the chair, into the machine that took apart his mind and remade it.  God, it hurt.  He screamed and cried but no one listened.  _“Steve…  Tell Steve it’s okay.”_   He thinks he said that.  Wept it.  He dreamed back then (now, too) about waking up to Steve’s face, Steve’s blue eyes and blond hair, just like a thousand days back in Brooklyn, just like in Azzano when Captain America arrived to rescue the 107th.  Even when they ripped Steve from the fabric of his memories, that stayed, this intrinsic hope down in the core of him where all HYDRA’s torture and technology couldn’t touch it.  Steve would come.  Steve would rescue him.  _“Tell Steve I miss him.”_

But it was never Steve.  Over and over again he woke up to different times, different faces, but the times never changed and all the faces had that same awful, cruel, sadistic smirk, that same evil, hungry glint in their eyes.  And he always begged for the same thing.  _“Tell Steve it’s okay.  When you gotta go, you gotta go.”_   It was never Steve there when they woke him up and dragged him to the chair and zapped his brain until he was throwing up, drooling, limp and compliant.  Steve never came.  _“Tell Steve I lo–”_

Bucky wakes up with a gasp.  The shadows are thick with night, thick and tight around him, and he chokes.  He doesn’t know where he is, what he is.  Who he is.  The nightmares are chaotic and random and slow to fade, and he’s lost in the storm.  His breath is charged and shallow and fast in the silence, and his heart won’t stop pounding.  He tries to clutch his chest because _it hurts_ , but his arm’s not moving.  He doesn’t understand why for a second and then he looks over.  Even in the darkness, he can see it’s gone.  He doesn’t know if he should be relieved or horrified.  He’s both, but most of all he’s twisted up in the hell in his head – harsh hands and red and gold and hateful glowing eyes and _I don’t care he killed my mom_ – and he barks out a sob before he can stop himself.  The fucking insanity – this mishmash of HYDRA’s conditioning and who he was and what he wants to be and all the trauma, _seventy fucking years of trauma_ – is crowding at the edge of his thoughts, and he cries and laughs at the same time.

 _“Zhelaniye.”_   It takes him a moment to realize the word’s coming from him.  He whispers it again.  _“Zhelaniye.”_   It’s the only word of the trigger he ever remembers.  His brain’s been conditioned to forget the rest, a failsafe to maintain security and ensure compliance.  Even now, this compromised after two years away from the machine, he can’t focus on the rest of the words Zemo said to him back in Berlin.  He remembers feeling rage, frustration, terror as that fog came over his mind, the one that strangled his will and left him an empty shell incapable of choice.  But he can’t ever remember the rest of the words.  And he wonders about that one now where he never has before, now that it’s fresh and he has the sentience to really think about it.  Why that word?

Beside him a body stirs ever so slightly.  Bucky startles, turns, and stares.  Steve _is_ there, after all.  There are facts trying to gain traction in his head, that Steve is on the run with him and Steve is trying to protect him, that they’re hiding and trying to escape ( _we’re not fucking going anywhere, not like this_ ).  But in moments like these, where everything is blurred and indistinct and crushed together inside him, the comfort of the programming somehow gets stronger.  It’s easier to defer, _not_ to choose.  HYDRA taught him that sort of submission, to find solace in orders and directives.  Mission objectives.  And the mission he failed to complete is lying right beside him. 

 _Target is wounded._   That’s certainly true.  He can see it, hear it, the pallor of Steve’s bruised face and the wet rattle of his breath.  He’s sleeping or unconscious, most likely the latter.  _Target poses minimum threat._   If Steve’s lung is punctured badly enough, he’s likely drowning in his own blood.  There is only so much the serum can do with a hunk of rib piercing internal organs.  Bucky considers that, torn between the cold detachment of the Winter Soldier and the horrifically overwhelming worry that’s just starting to seem familiar.  _Target will be easily terminated._

He’s reaching his flesh and blood hand to Steve’s exposed throat, but just that – _metal fingers clenching and strangling and Steve struggling, blue eyes filled with pain and so much desperation_ – makes him stop before it gets any further.  Then there’s something else.  Steve’s laugh.  _“Get offa me, Buck.”_

It was Sunday afternoon and hot, so damn hot you could fry an egg.  They were in their apartment, baking with the rest of Brooklyn, indolent and lethargic, and Bucky somehow snagged the last bit of ice from the almost empty icebox.  He was running that over his sweaty neck and chest when Steve swiped it.  Now they were wrestling over it, skin slick and flushed pink from the heat, laughing in their kitchen like a couple of goofs.  Steve fought dirty, going for all Bucky’s ticklish spots, but Bucky had him pinned now, thin wrists trapped in one big hand against the linoleum, straddling him.  The ice was still clenched in Steve’s long fingers despite Bucky’s repeated efforts to pry it out before.  _“What?”_ he said, grinning mischievously, burning alive and not caring a bit. _“You can dish it out but not take it, Rogers?”_

 _“I can take anything you can give me, Barnes,”_ Steve said with a smirk.  Him and his sass.  Bucky leaned down, and the ice slipped forgotten from Steve’s hand, and…

He’s back in the room, on the bed with big Steve instead of little Steve from his memory.  His fingers are brushing against the vulnerable skin of Steve’s throat.  “Jesus Christ,” he breathes, yanking his hand away like Steve physically burned him.  “Jesus Christ.”  The Winter Soldier vanished, leaving only Bucky, the tattered remains of who he was trapped in this body that doesn’t match.  He barks out a soft sob, shaking, turning away as much as he can considering how his chest constricts and his stump throbs.  It hurts.  Goddamn it, _it hurts._   And he’s scared.  He’s really scared.

Steve’s dying and he can’t make himself move.  _Bucky would protect him.  Bucky would carry him.  Bucky would get him out of here._

He’s not who he was.  He’s not that Bucky.

That Bucky would have let Tony Stark kill him on the spot to spare Steve from having to choose.

* * *

The night wears on.  Bucky’s so lost.  He lays there uselessly, trapped between nightmares and wakefulness.  On some level he knows Steve’s getting worse.  Stupid Steve who carried him here with a chest full of burns and broken bones.  Steve’s not breathing even as well as he was a couple of hours ago.  It’s weak, a shallow, ineffective thing that barely passes through parted lips.  And Steve’s white in the darkness, so white that Bucky fears he’s dead already.

And he just fucking lays there, too scared to move.  Some part of him is trying to rationalize it.  He’s down an arm and in so much crippling pain that there’s ostensibly nothing he can do.  He can’t lift Steve, not like this.  He’s woozy from everything.  When Stark kicked his face, it feels like it jostled stuff loose, and he can’t put it back.  He’s delirious.  The memories keep coming, too.  He can’t stop them.  This time, though he’s sure Steve is lying right beside him, as still as a corpse, he feels like Steve’s standing in front of him.  The chilly room is more like a sweltering, miserable tent.  He was somewhat delirious then, too, in this memory.  Steve just brought them back, him and the rest of the surviving 107th, from Azzano.  The shock of being tortured, of what Zola did to him, was bad enough, but the shock of seeing little Steve Rogers turned into a super soldier was the thing that was too much to bear.  The second medical cleared him with instructions to eat to replenish his starving body and rest, he bolted.

And Steve, the asshole, followed.  He pulled back the tent flap and came in uninvited.  _“Buck?”_

_“Shove off, Rogers.”_

Steve could wear blinders like no one else, and he never took a hint.  _“What’s the matter?  You left in a hurry back there…”_

Bucky was trying to hold it together.  Really, he was.  But it was too damn much.  He’s realizing as he’s staring into the darkness with Steve barely wheezing beside him that he feels now like he felt then.  Off kilter.  Wrong.  That was how it was on that table in the lab when he opened his eyes and focused and saw Steve, _big Steve_ with healthy color and fleshed out cheeks and breathing deeply like he never had a day with asthma in his life.  And that was how it was in that tent, with Steve in all his impressive height and more impressive physique blocking the flap and looking like someone was in the process of ripping his heart of his chest.  _“Buck…”_

Those blue eyes are always the same.  Then, now, dream or nightmare or memory or reality…  _“Why’d you do it?  Huh?”_

 _“Why’d I do what?”_   Bucky remembers looking away, staring at the grass with so much hot intensity that it was pretty shocking the ground didn’t spontaneously combust.  _“Why’d I come after you?  Why’d I get you out of there?  Why what, Bucky?”_

Bucky wonders more and more if he always had a short fuse and just never noticed, or if years of watching Steve Rogers throw himself recklessly into danger to do what needs to be done just wore him down over time.  At that moment, it was all he could do not to throw the punch at Steve.  _“I saw what they did to you.”_  Back there in medical, as the army docs worked with the injured and suffering, SSR sent people in to examine Captain America.  To make sure he was alright, of course, but to get a read on the magic potion or whatever they poured into his body.  All the sudden sick, scrawny Steve was brimming with vitality, tall and muscular and healthier than a man had any right to be.  And all the sudden the world, which couldn’t have cared less about little Steve, cared a great deal about Captain America.

His own trauma notwithstanding, that fact shook Bucky to his core.  He couldn’t shake the image of Steve strapped down to a table, just like he was, with men in lab coats dumping poison in his veins.  _“You let them do it.  You volunteered.”_

Steve stared at him like he couldn’t understand the problem.  _“I had to.”_

_“No, you didn’t!  You never think!  I left you back home.  I wanted you to finish college and get a good job and stay safe.  I told you not to do anything stupid, remember?  The night I left.  I told you that, and you go and do the stupidest thing you’ve ever fucking done!”_

_“I had to,”_ Steve said again, like that was reason enough.  Maybe it was.  Bucky doesn’t know now and he didn’t know then.  Steve was across the tent in two huge steps, and if he was breathless it was because he was all fired up, not because he couldn’t breathe.  The serum fixed him.  How could Bucky not be thankful for that?  How could he begrudge him that?  Steve’s eyes were so deeply blue in the dying daylight, and he cupped Bucky’s unshaven face and shook his head.  _“I had to.  I couldn’t let you leave me behind.  I couldn’t let you be in danger out here without anyone watching your back.”_

 _“That’s exactly why you should have stayed,”_ Bucky insisted, shaking with how angry he was.  _“It’s dangerous out here.  This is a war, and I didn’t want you in it.  I wanted you to stay home so I’d know you would be okay!”_

_“I don’t want to be okay.  I want to be with you.”_

Bucky cradled his face too and pulled him close.  _“God, Steve…”_

There’s noise outside, and Bucky’s forcing his eyes open, only the noise isn’t the army camp interrupting the moment.  They’re not _in_ the tent after Azzano.  They’re in a tiny room in Siberia, both of them too wounded to move, and Steve’s bleeding out inside his body.

But the noise is still there.  Soft footsteps.  Someone less expertly trained in combat than the Winter Soldier wouldn’t have noticed, but Bucky does.  His eyes go wide, and he struggles to lean up in the small space.  Without his arm, it’s so difficult, but he manages, because the footsteps in the snow outside are getting firmer and closer.  The slightest hint of a shadow crosses the curtains.  _Shit._   Someone is definitely here.

“Steve,” Bucky rasps, and his voice sounds mangled and dry.  He tries to sit up more, but his whole sense of balance is off without the weight of his arm.  Steve doesn’t answer, which makes Bucky panic and turn to look more carefully.  It takes some effort that sends bolts of pain up and down his torso to get grimy, bloody fingers pressed to Steve’s neck.  There’s a weak flutter at his carotid artery, and Bucky feels sick with relief.  It doesn’t matter much, though.  Steve’s not waking up.  Even if he did, Bucky can’t get him out of here.  They can’t fight.  They can’t run.

Bucky’s tired of running.

He lays back down, unable to support his weight anymore.  He knows he should do better, but he can’t.  HYDRA ruined him.  The war ruined him.  The Bucky that Steve knew is dead already, so it doesn’t matter that they’re finished here and now.  Steve’s right.  _There’s no going back._

He closes his eyes and moves as close to Steve’s fading warmth as he can manage.

The door knob twists.  It’s locked.  That won’t hold whoever’s come for them.  The government.  The Avengers.  Stark.  It doesn’t matter.  The end’s the same.

_The end of the line._

The door breaks open.  The cold air pours in, a wave of ice and pain.  Morning light comes, too.  Bucky flinches.  He can’t help it.  He feels someone approach.  This is it.  He just prays it doesn’t hurt, not him and especially not Steve.

A hand touches his forehead.  He opens his eyes.  It’s hard to focus again, but he does, and the Black Panther looms over him.  It’s so jarring that he doesn’t process it at all for a few seconds.  It’s not the Black Panther actually but the man beneath it.  The black vibranium suit catches the meager light, shining weakly, and T’Challa’s other hand, free of its gloves and their claws, grasp Bucky’s good hand where it’s draped over Steve.  He moves it aside, dark eyes narrowed in worry.  He presses his fingertips to Steve’s neck, deeply dismayed.  “You shouldn’t have run,” he says.

Bucky’s not sure what he’s talking about.  Before?  Now?  _Run.  Fight._ It’s all he knows how to do anymore.  And he knows he can’t trust – _shouldn’t trust_ – but there’s no going back to the life he led a couple days ago.  Not with Steve.  He needs to save Steve.  So he surrenders.  “Help him,” he whimpers.

T’Challa’s eyes are dark and determined in the new day.  “I will.”

* * *

There was a time in Bucky’s life where he prized his capacity to make decisions.  He made a lot of them.  He chose to be a good son to his parents, a good brother to his sisters.  He chose to be a good student at school and a good worker at his job.  He chose to enlist, chose to fight, chose to do the best he could.  He chose to pull the bullies off Steve on the way home from school their first day.  His family had just moved to Brooklyn from Shelbyville, and he was walking back to their new apartment when he heard the fight.  The tiny blond kid from his class was there, trying to keep some bigger kids from picking on a little girl with a lisp.  The boy stood there, alight with fire and spunk even though the bigger kids outnumbered him and were significantly brawnier.  Bucky couldn’t stand to watch them beat him down, so he ran down the alley and planted himself right in between the blond kid and the kids and threw a punch like he was born to.

He chose to do that then, chose every time after, because it was right.  The world could be confusing, but he always knew that.  _Steve_ was right.  Steve had the moral compass, the one that invariably pointed the right way, and Bucky made sure he could follow it.  Bucky made sure he was safe, that he had a friend, that he was as healthy and well looked after as he could be, that he wasn’t alone.  That was Bucky’s choice, and he always made it without a second thought.  All through their childhoods.  All through the war.  All the way up to a train speeding through the Alps with a HYDRA thug shooting them back and breaking the car’s side and knocking Bucky out of it.

All the way to a river underneath a falling helicarrier.

He thinks about it now, about the decisions he used to make that are becoming clearer and clearer to him, and he realizes that one, the one where he _chose_ to jump into the river and grab Steve’s unconscious body as he sank, was the first one he made since falling from the train.  The first one after seventy years of servitude as HYDRA’s warrior and weapon.

He still doesn’t know why he did it.

Back in Bucharest, Steve insisted he did.  But he still doesn’t, not exactly.  The warm feeling inside him makes everything difficult to understand.  The Winter Soldier – _the Asset_ – wasn’t permitted emotions.  He was a machine made to follow orders and nothing more.  A slave.  Dehumanized.  And for the years he was on the run, with his memories scattered and his nightmares ever present, the emotions he had weren’t these that he’s having now.  It wasn’t until he woke up in that warehouse with his arm in a vise, with Steve’s blue eyes cautiously hopeful and things coming back to him in a way they never had before…  It wasn’t until then that _Bucky_ really came to life inside him.  Broke the chains around his heart and was free.  Here and now.  _Free._

Bucky’s had a strange relationship with time since he fell.  It moves so slowly through the dark periods.  There’s never enough when he needs to work and run.  His good memories that return seem a lifetime ago, and they are (seventy years) but they’re not (not really).  There are monstrous gaps in his life, decades where he slept deep and dreamless, moments his brain still won’t recognize like their mere existence is too traumatizing to accept, long nights spent alone and scared and uncertain.  Now, in this strange place where things are quiet and calm, clean and sleek and advanced beyond anything he’s ever imagined when he was kid and reading science fiction serials by lamplight with Steve late at night in Steve’s bed…  For the first time in forever, he feels steady enough to breathe.

So he breathes.  And he watches Steve breathe.  He’s done that so much in his life.  He sees that now.  And he drifts between wakefulness and sleep some more, languid and unbothered.  The flight from Siberia to Africa is a blur to him.  He knows he was unconscious for a portion of it, sucked under again by the pain of his arm and the damage done to his body.  Vaguely he knew T’Challa’s people were taking care of him, of the cracked ribs he had and the concussion he suffered and all of the rest of the damage.  Vaguely he knew he safe.  And he could see Steve beside him, laying on another stretcher as the Wakandan doctors tried to stabilize him.  There was a tube down Steve’s throat and another in his chest and a lot of blood.  There was also a blur of words, Steve’s deplorable vitals and a collapsed lung and the need for surgery, but Bucky wasn’t able to focus on any of it.  He just knew Steve was breathing.  Sleeping.

_“Wake up, Bucky.  You’re crushing me.”_

Bucky took a deep breath and snuggled closer instead, burrowing his nose into Steve’s neck.  He had an arm across Steve’s chest, holding his shoulder, and one leg over both Steve’s.  It was Saturday and too damn cold and early to get up.  They went dancing last night.  Well, Bucky danced, both with his date and with Steve’s who couldn’t be bothered to give him the time of day.  That was the way it always went.  It worked okay.  Kept up appearances at least.  At any rate, he was tired and a little hung over and Steve was warm and soft and breathing nice and slow despite the winter months and the dry air.  Bucky could feel every beat of Steve’s heart where his lips were, could feel every easy movement of his lungs.  And Steve smelled like home.  _“No.”_

_“Get off me, you mook.  I gotta pee.”_

_“Hold it,”_ he grumbled.  _“Ain’t movin’.”_

Steve huffed unhappily.  _“You’re a lazy asshole.”_   Bucky smiled into his neck.  _“Wake up!”_

Bucky wakes up.  This isn’t Brooklyn.  No, he’s in this hospital room again, white and clean and very far from home, from the dark, cold hovel in Siberia, from Bucharest, from the machine that took his memories.  This is some place new and strange, impossible if not for the fact they’re there.

_Wakanda._

Despite what happened, T’Challa found them and brought them to his kingdom.  It’s not the first time over the last couple of days he’s come to awareness here.  Every time he does, he wonders for a moment if he’s not dreaming again, dreaming something else, because _this_ reality is so incongruous with all the ones he’s known.  But he’s not.  This isn’t a dream.  They’ve been brought to royal palace, to T’Challa’s home.  They’re under his protection, wards of his nation, fugitives still but safe.  Safe and free.

He sits up gingerly and inhales deeply.  The air is fresh and cool.  The hospital bed is firm yet soft and comfortable under him.  He’s dressed in white pajamas and clean for the first time that he can remember, and he splays a hand over his chest and feels the soft fabric.  His arm doesn’t even hurt, at least nothing beyond a dull throb he can ignore.  He’s alright.  Healing.  Recovering.  There are no shadows here, and Steve is right there beside him, in another bed, _breathing._   He looks so much better, has every time Bucky has seen him.  The damage to his face is disappearing, awful breaks and bruises fading to purple splotches.  Rest and the serum are healing his other wounds, the burns and contusions.  He’s breathing on his own after the surgery that saved his life.  He’s even been awake a few times, disoriented as all get out and not quite following what people are telling him, but awake.  _Okay._

“He will be alright.”

The voice makes Bucky turn away from Steve where he sleeps, and he sees T’Challa at the door of their hospital room.  Though this is the first time they’ve really talked, Bucky’s seen the other man after T’Challa found them in that tiny Russian village outside the bunker.  T’Challa has been in and out since they arrived.  At first there were guards with him, a dangerous looking woman with no hair leading them, but as the days have passed, the king more often comes alone.  Bucky takes that as a sign of trust, though he maybe shouldn’t.  He manages a nod.  “I know.”  If Steve’s okay, it’s with no thanks to Bucky himself.

T’Challa turns to Steve, watching him a moment, and Bucky feels exposed, little more than a nerve that’s raw and throbbing.  The king gives a long, slow breath.  “It should never have come to what it did.”  He looks down.  “And we are all to blame for it.”  Bucky doesn’t know what to say to that.  It’s his fault mostly.  Here and now, where things are clearer and his mind’s not so overthrown, he’s realized he doesn’t fault anyone.  Not the government or the Avengers.  Not Zemo.  Not T’Challa.  Not even Stark.  “Vengeance drives men to madness.”

Bucky nods again.  “Sometimes it’s warranted.  I’m sorry about your father.”

He doesn’t know what to expect from T’Challa.  Until now, they’ve been enemies in every sense of the word.  Now…  The young man gives a small, weak grin.  “Thank you.  He has left some very big shoes to fill.  I thought I was not ready to do that, but I already am, whether I’m ready or not.  It was time to take the first step, so to speak.  That’s why I brought you here.”

“What do you mean?”

“To honor his spirit,” T’Challa clarifies.  “My father believed very much in peace and in forgiveness.”

Those two things are foreign to Bucky.  They sound nice, though, if unattainable.  And if T’Challa hadn’t come, he and Steve would have died.  He knows that much.  T’Challa saved them, saved Steve, where he couldn’t.  “Thank you.”

The king glances to him, clasping his hands together at the small of his back.  They’re silent a moment, each of them watching Steve slumber comfortably and untroubled.  The new memories are coming again, a flood of them, but they’re not bad.  Steve sleeping after being so sick, and Bucky sitting there, keeping vigil, shaking in relief that the worst was over.  Steve sleeping like this at home, on couch cushions and on Bucky’s bed and with him when they gave up on trying to shiver alone through the winter and pushed their cots together.  Steve sleeping like this during the war, somehow finding solace enough to close his eyes despite everything going on and the danger all around him, and Bucky was too scared and disturbed to let go.  Watching Steve sleep is a mainstay of his life, and he’s just realizing it now.

“You are not what they made you be,” T’Challa declares, breaking the long silence.  “In hindsight, it bothers me a great deal that no one took even a moment to so much as consider your circumstances.  The evidence was there in SHIELD’s data, or so I’ve been told by my advisers.  And the torment you suffered…  I am sorry for that.”  Bucky looks away sharply.  This is the first time _anyone_ aside from Steve has acknowledged, must less apologized for, what he went through as HYDRA’s prisoner.  It’s coming from an unlikely source, but it still feels good.  Vindicating, in a sense, though he’s not sure he deserves that.  “You are no longer their weapon.”

He looks down at where his arm was.  Not only is the pain quieter, but the weight of it is gone, too.  The symbolism of it.  _The fist of HYDRA._   “No, I’m not.”  He narrows his eyes and the world blurs.  “But I’m not some innocent victim, either.”

T’Challa looks sad and pensive.  “My father also believed in compassion.”  That tempers Bucky’s disgust.  T’Challa frowns.  “He supported the Accords.  I know the Captain feared they would be a leash, and perhaps they could be that in the wrong hands.  I can concede his fears are not unfounded.  But the Accords were never meant to dominate him or anyone else, at least not in my father’s mind.  For so long our nation has hid in our own world, content to ignore the problems beyond our borders…  But we began to see that turning a blind eye to the suffering of others is no better than inflicting that suffering yourself.  If you can act to stop evil and you choose not to, then when evil is done, you are no less guilty.  Justice is not won without action.”

 _Justice._   That’s another concept Bucky doesn’t understand.  It frightens him and angers him at once.  There’s no justice for the people he assassinated, not for Howard and Maria Stark nor for Tony.  But there’s no justice for him, either.  T’Challa sighs again.  “And action often requires sacrifice.”  He finally turns to Bucky.  “The Avengers have carried the burden of that sacrifice alone for far too long.  I see now that my father wished for the Accords to ease that burden, to help bear the sacrifice.  To help, not control.”

Bucky thinks back on what Steve said.  “It’s not easy to trust.”

T’Challa tips his head and smiles ruefully.  “No, I suppose it’s not.  But sometimes all we have is faith in people to do the right thing.”  His smile turns a tad knowing.  “And faith in those who love us.”

It’s stupid, but the word – _love_ – gives Bucky pause.  That feeling inside him, wandering and lost and uncertain…

_How could I be so damn blind?_

If T’Challa notices his lapse, he doesn’t show it.  “You and Captain Rogers may stay as long as you desire.  We will help you recover in whatever we can.  My medical staff are willing to look into your situation, if you wish.  Perhaps there is something we can do to cut the last chains around you.  And you need not worry.  You’re safe here.”

The king excuses himself, leaves, but Bucky hardly notices him go.  He’s staring at Steve while he sleeps, staring like he has so much of late but finally understanding what his brain hasn’t let him see before.  The emotions he couldn’t _understand_ before.  He understands now.

He feels more lost than ever.

* * *

Steve wakes up.  He’s better.  It’s no time at all before the serum heals him to the point where he’s back on his feet, walking around, talking, eyes bright and blue and body strong and heart unyielding.  That’s who he is.  He gets up over and over again.  This time is no different.

And they’re together.  _Together._   It feels strange and disconcerting to Bucky, but Steve’s aglow with it.  The world is falling apart without Captain America, the Avengers fractured and the Accords causing a rift among nations as the truth of what really happened starts to seep out of the wreckage.  However, here in this safe haven, nothing seems to reach them.  Steve’s smiling softly, laughing gently, talking about _that time when_ or _do you remember how._ Bucky humors him but can’t look him in the eye.  He’s ashamed to have not made sense of the jumble of memories, to not piece together _who_ Bucky Barnes was and what he means to Steve Rogers.  All this time, _two years_ of ignoring the obvious…  He hates himself all the more for that.  There’s a tension between them, but he’s wondering if he’s the only one who feels it.  Steve seems oblivious.  He acknowledges Bucky’s discomfort, always there with a _friendly_ hand on his good shoulder, with a sweet smile that should encourage as well as ease Bucky’s worries, but it’s not enough.  Bucky doesn’t know what to do with what Steve makes him feel.  He doesn’t even know _what_ Steve is making him feel.  Two years of running, remembering, learning, writing down the facts with that cool detachment…  That was nothing compared to this.  _He doesn’t know what to do._   It’s getting worse and worse as more of his memories come back, as they spend more and more time together.   

The nightmares are still there, too.  He still fears them.  Dreads and hates them.  They’ve been in Wakanda almost a week now, and their suite has adjoining bedrooms.  As an aside, Bucky thinks he’s such a fucking moron for not putting it all together, the sad look Steve gets when Bucky goes to his own bedroom at night that Steve can’t quash before Bucky notices, the longing in Steve’s eyes that he does a shit job of hiding…  Steve has always been a poor liar and a poor actor.  Be that as it may, though, he _can’t_ sleep with Steve, even if he wants to.  He knows the Winter Soldier isn’t gone, even if his arm is.  After talking with T’Challa, he entertained the hope that it could be that simple.  It’s not.  The nightmares.  The flashbacks.  The memories and madness scraping at his brain.  In a way, it’s almost worse than before, than those two years on the run.  He was so out of touch with himself and the world that it was easier to detach, and he was alone, so it was easier to hide.  Steve is _right here_ with him; there’s no hiding what’s going on, how each night since they escaped Siberia he’s suffering.  And it’s not just that.  With what Bucky knows now, with Steve here, _it’s worse._   There’s so much more emotion attached to it.  Guilt.  Terror.  Rage and frustration.  He wants Steve safe, but the Winter Soldier wants him dead.  He wants Steve close, but the Winter Soldier can’t handle his touch.  He wants to cherish, but the Winter Soldier _destroys_.

He can’t face any of that, so he’s been pushing Steve away.  His memories feed him more and more, context for Steve’s little looks and hesitant touches.  The things Steve doesn’t say when he offers up the obligatory _“it’s alright, Buck”._   The things Steve wants when he lets go and smiles.  It’s all there, coming back in fits and spurts, and Bucky doesn’t know what to do with it.  Freedom.  Choices.  He’s in a weird limbo where he wishes for the simplicity of orders.  It’s building inside him, twisting him up, torturing him in ways that nothing’s ever tortured him before.  _Steve’s Bucky would confront his fears._

He’s still not that Bucky.  And Steve’s looking at him for the man he knew, searching him, without even meaning to.  It hurts.  God, it does.

It’s one afternoon not long after they’re both on their feet.  Bucky’s napping in the living room of their suite after another sleepless night.  It doesn’t take much at all for the dreams to come.  Memories, chaotic and disjointed.  Then the nightmares.  In his dream, he’s torturing someone.  He doesn’t think it’s Steve.  Steve’s so littered all over everything in his head that it’s hard for him to tell.  He’s researched enough of what the Winter Soldier’s done to be pretty certain HYDRA never had him torture Captain America, and Steve’s never said anything of the like, but then that assumes Steve would be truthful, and Bucky’s getting the idea that Steve no matter his size and no matter the time and place would cut his own arm off just so Bucky won’t feel different.  Whoever Bucky’s torturing in his dream isn’t screaming, no matter how he hits and how rough he hurts.  Bucky can’t see his face.  He’s got a hand in the prisoner’s hair, yanking his head back, but the features don’t come together to form anyone he recognizes.  Some part of his brain thinks that’s the point; there are so many victims that this is just one more.  Nameless.  Faceless.  But he can’t shake the fear that it’s Steve, and that makes it so much worse.  He’s out of control.  He’s hitting and hitting, angry at Steve and terrified that it’s Steve he’s torturing and wanting Steve so badly…  He doesn’t care who it is.  He’s nothing but violence.

 _Longing._   He doesn’t know if it was intentional, if HYDRA heard him whispering in the dark when he was strapped to that table, if the Russians actually listened when he begged.  And maybe it’s fitting, that that’s the word that triggers him, the only one he ever remembers.  _Longing._

And he sees it now, the memories he couldn’t quite understand before.  Steve breathing over a pail of steaming water, Bucky’s hand stroking up and down his back.  _“Just breathe, Steve.  Breathe.  In and out.  Come on, pal.  You can do this.  Come on.  I’m right here, and I love you, Steve.  Come on.  You can do this.”_

Praying at Steve’s bedside, holding his hand tight, kissing it, crying.  _“Don’t you quit on me, Steve.  You hear?  I can’t lose you.  God, I can’t…  Please, Steve, baby, please hang on…  I love you…”_

Pinning Steve down on the kitchen floor, laughing and leaning down to kiss him quiet as he squirms and sasses.  _“You can take anything, huh.”_   Kissing him and kissing him and kissing him with his free hand scrambling down Steve’s pants.

Hiding in the tent after Azzano, Steve’s bright blue eyes desperate and deep with love right in front of him.  Cradling his face.  _“I’m still me, Buck.  I’m still me.”_ Clinging to each other.  Kissing each other breathless, even if they might get caught.  A promise and an affirmation.  There was nothing more important than this, than Steve.

Nothing more important.  A million moments.  Stolen kisses.  Sneaky caresses.  Knowing glances and teasing grins and a friendship that ran so deep that love was only a natural course.  Their shitty apartment filled with soft breaths and quiet moans.  Steve in his lap, Steve beneath him, beside him, inside him.  Being inside Steve, because Steve was always so giving, letting Bucky take whatever he wanted and needed.  Steve’s so good and pure, the only good and pure thing in the world.  The only light.  The only truth.  The only part of Bucky worth anything.

And he nearly lost it.  _Murdered it._

He’s a monster.

“Bucky!  Bucky!”

Hands grab at his face, familiar hands, and Bucky screams.  He’s jolted awake, and the training overtakes him in the second of disoriented weakness.  He’s swinging with his left arm, the fingers balled into a fist, but the strike hits nothing because there’s no arm to swing.  Undaunted, he compensates, getting his right arm free of a cautious grip to grab at the throat of his attacker.  He squeezes hard, kicking and rolling.  Something shatters – the coffee table – and they’re on the floor in the mess.  He pins the body beneath him, choking viciously, his fingers digging into pale pink flesh.  “Bucky,” gasps a strangled voice.  “Bucky!  Stop!  _Stop!_ It’s me!  _It’s Steve!”_

That thing inside him screams in horror, and he lets go instantly.  It _is_ Steve’s face below him, flushed and a little bruised, and he can’t remember how those bruises got there.  His dream.  Did he do that?  Did he…

Steve sucks in a desperate breath, coughing and shuddering in the wreckage of the coffee table.  He’s limp, pliant, unmoving despite how Bucky’s got him at his mercy.  Reality steps in as the seconds tick away and the nightmare fades.  Steve’s not fighting.  Not fighting.  _Not fighting back._

Horrified, Bucky’s up and staggering away.  “Wait, Buck,” Steve gasps, reaching after him.  “Buck!”

Bucky doesn’t wait.  He doesn’t stop.  He runs.

* * *

The world is vast and green and full of possibilities.  Bucky stands at the window of his bedroom and looks over it, over the lush trees of the jungles of Wakanda, over the mountains and streams, over the gray sky and thick mist that blankets it all.  Peeking through that is the sun as it sets, and the golden light skirts the top of the mist like one of Steve’s paintbrushes lightly and reverently adding color to a canvas.  That makes him smile when it shouldn’t.  Other things do, too.  Taking the subway home from the cinema, holding hands in a way they’ve practiced again and again so that no one would see.  Walking the boardwalk at Coney Island, Steve’s eyes almost unbearably blue in the hot summer sun as he drinks down a bottle of Coke.  Sitting atop their apartment building not long after Steve’s mother passed, watching the sunset.

_“You think we’ll get into the war?”_

Bucky shrugged.  He had a cigarette dangling from his right hand, and he was squinting into the sunset.  He never smoked much.  It bothered Steve’s lungs.  But up here, the rest of the air was stagnant and hot and uncomfortable to breathe, so he figured it’d be okay.  _“Maybe.”_

Steve didn’t look happy.  _“I want to go, if we do.”_

Bucky played dumb.  _“Go what?”_

_“Enlist.”_

_“You’re fucking nuts,”_ Bucky said lightly, nudging him with his arm.

Steve didn’t take well to his dismissal, frowning and scowling that way he did when someone – anyone – looked down on him because of his size.  _“You don’t think I can do it.”_

_“Stevie, you know that I know you can do anything you want.”_

_“But not that.”_   Bucky grunted in annoyance, taking a drag from his smoke and desperately trying to think his way out of this conversation.  _“Buck, come on.  What, am I supposed to sit here and watch everyone else go off and risk their lives?”_

 _“Would be nice if you did,”_ Bucky admitted in an irritated tone.  _“Would be nice if for once you just let someone else fight the fight.  You don’t gotta prove what you’re made of.  We all know it.”_

_“It’s not about that.”_

_“Then what’s it about?  Your dad?”_   Frustrated, Steve shook his head.  Bucky knew he was lying.  _“Being a man?  ’Cause you know you’re twice the man as everyone else around here.”_

_“No, that’s not–”_

_“Then what?”_ Bucky’s voice broke with exasperation, and his eyes were steeped in anger.  He knew he was getting emotional, but, damn it, he was scared.  Ever since the newspapers started on about what was happening in Europe, Hitler and Nazis and Poland being invaded and France turning into a battleground, Bucky had been afraid of this.  He’d been scared shitless, because he _knew_ Steve, knew what he was thinking without him ever saying it.  And he couldn’t let that happen.  _“What, Steve?  Why can’t you just let it go?”_

 _“Because it’s not right, and I have to do the right thing.  If I don’t…”_   Steve shook his head, reached for Bucky’s cigarette and took a drag of it, too, even though they both knew it’d be hell for his lungs later (it wasn’t even one of his cigarettes for his asthma).  But that was Steve for you.  You push him, he pushes back.  He lives a life of double-dog dare, has since the day he was born, premature and tiny and with a midwife telling his recently widowed mother than he wouldn’t make it more than a day or two.  He was twenty-two now, and Bucky was twenty-three, and the sun was setting over Brooklyn with a world full of possibilities before them, and _this_ was the only path, the only road.  The only option.  _“If I don’t go, I couldn’t live with myself.  I can’t do any less than anyone else.”_   He gave a sideways glance at Bucky as he smooshed the smoldering cigarette into the rooftop.  _“Besides, you’ll go, won’t you?”_

There was no way in hell he’d ever disappoint Steve.  Even if he didn’t get drafted (which he was pretty damn sure he would be, if things went the way they looked), he had to go.  If he didn’t, he couldn’t look Steve in the eye, Steve with all his righteous strength and bravery and determination, with his soul that was so much bigger and braver than his small, frail body.  Steve who was willing to go out into a warzone with his weak lungs and struggling heart and crooked spine and bad ear.  _“Yeah,”_ Bucky declared.  _“Yeah, I’ll go.”_

 _“Then I’ll go, too.  Ma made me promise.”_ Steve blinked, the glitter of wetness in his eyes unmistakable.  _“She made me promise to take care of you.  ‘Keep following him, Steve,’ she said.”_

 _Follow him, James._   She’d said the same thing to Bucky.  Bucky grunted in surprise.  Sarah Rogers was a remarkable woman.  For all the effort they’d put into hiding how they felt for each other…  She’d known, probably always had.  Steve missed her so much.  They both did.  _“Yeah.”_

 _“Then we go together.”_   Steve took his hand, his thin, bony fingers weaving through Bucky’s own, and they watched the sun go down.

Bucky blinks, and it’s not the city skyline he’s staring at anymore.  It’s the jungle again.  Open and wide and brimming with life.  For a moment, he wonders how he got here.  How _the hell_ both of them got _here,_ seventy years in the future, on the other side of the world, everyone else they knew and love dead and gone.  Those possibilities.  Choices.  _Free will._

But, just like then, there’s only one choice.

He knows what he has to do.

He leaves his bedroom and goes back into the main living area.  The broken table has been cleaned away, and all other signs of the horrific moment a couple of hours ago is gone.  Steve’s gone, too, but Bucky knows he’s around.  He spent most of his life attuned to every movement Steve makes, and that sense of him has returned surprisingly quickly.  Quietly he heads to Steve’s bedroom.

Steve’s sitting on the couch, bent over the coffee table.  He’s got a pen in his hand and a sheet of white paper in front of him.  An envelope is off the side, blank, and the paper’s blank, too.  Only the word _“Tony”_ is scrawled at the top left.  Steve seems like he’s been sitting there a while, motionless and burdened, but he immediately looks up before Bucky’s even all the way in the room.  They stare at each other.  Bucky knows he needs to do this before he loses his nerve.  “I…”  He swallows, forces the words out.  “I figured it out.”

Steve’s expression is a bit guarded.  There’s angry bruising around his neck, and his lip looks freshly swollen.  “What’s that, Buck?”

“I figured out why I pulled you from the river.”  Steve just stares at him, seemingly stoic.  Seemingly.  He’s still shit for lying.  He sets his pen down and swallows a little too forcefully, his Adam’s apple jerking, as he leans back and waits for Bucky to continue.

And Bucky continues.  “Jesus Christ, Steve!”  His voice breaks, _everything_ rushing at him.  It’s a storm, all the things that have been tearing him apart.  He can’t hold it back.  “Why didn’t you tell me?  Why?  Why didn’t you tell me on the bridge or on the helicarrier or back in Bucharest or during one of the million fucking moments on the quinjet while we sat in silence?  Huh?  _Why?_ ”

He knows the answer.  Of course he does.  But he wants to hear Steve say it.  Steve looks down, swallows again, and Bucky can _see_ him cracking.  “I…  I didn’t want to push you.  I didn’t want to put you in a positon you didn’t want to be in.  You’re not…  You’re not who you were back then.”  Hearing Steve admit _that_ makes the pain worse.  All this time…  He’s thought that Steve saw him as the old Bucky, _Steve’s Bucky_ , and now…  “You don’t have to be.  You shouldn’t have to be.  And you had enough to deal with without me pressuring you about – about us.  So that’s why I didn’t tell you.”

“And you just get to sit here, suffering in silence?”

“I was waiting,” Steve argues.  “I figured you’d remember eventually.  And I can wait.  Waited years to find you, so I could keep going.  I’d wait forever, Buck, if I had to.”

“Fucking hell,” Bucky moans.  His anger coils, and the training wraps around it possessively.  He ends up across the room, trying to put distance between him and Steve for Steve’s own fucking safety.  He’s pacing and raking his good hand through his hair, unable to stand still, unable to deal with any of this.  “I don’t want to hear that.  It’s romantic bullshit.”

“No, it’s the truth.”

“This isn’t what it was, Steve!  Don’t you see that?”  He shakes his head, blinking back tears, but they end up going down his face all the same.  “We’re not who we were!  We can’t get that back again!  There’s no going back!”

“I know that,” Steve says quietly.  “I already said I did.  And I just said I don’t need you to be who you were.  I want you, Buck, no matter who you are.”  He’s standing now, coming closer but not brave enough to be within an arm’s reach.  _An arm’s reach._ Bucky almost laughs at that, but he chokes it down it comes out as a twisted, tormented sob.  Steve shakes his head, clearly uncertain of what to do but wanting to fix it.  He forces himself to relax.  “No matter what.  Even if you’re the world’s enemy–”

“If?  I _am_ the world’s enemy!” Bucky snaps.  “There’s no if.  You don’t know what’s in my head, Steve.  I told you before.  All the stuff HYDRA put inside me is still there.  It’s not going away just because Stark blasted my arm off.”

Steve looks stricken, like hearing that dashes his own irrational hopes.  He finally chances a few steps closer.  “Buck, please…”

“It’s all…  It’s coming out now.  The closer I get to you, the more I remember.  And the more I remember, the worse it gets.  It’s a godawful mess.  I have nightmares.  Flashbacks.  Dreams and memories.  I dream…”  He shivers, but there’s no sense in hiding now.  “I dream about killing you.  About fucking you.  About loving you and hating you and begging for you and _longing_ for you.  About _hurting_ you.  Everything’s all screwed up.  It’s not going away.  _It’s not going away._ ”

“Let me help you,” Steve implores.  “Please.  We can figure this out.  I know we can.”

 _No, we can’t._   Bucky knows that now.  Knows it in his blood, deep in his bones, in the fabric of his heart and soul.  And it’s not a defeat.  He knows that, too.  It’s just…  He closes his eyes.  Breathes. Pushes it all back.  “This is the way it is,” he says softly, the fury fading as he silences the monster.  “This is the way it has to be.  I – I can’t do this.”

Steve’s eyes are wide with fear.  Wet with tears.  “What…  What’re you saying?”  Bucky doesn’t answer, trying to gather his thoughts.  His strength.  Steve gets more agitated and finally reaches over to touch his good arm.  He pulls Bucky around, gaze open and pleading.  “Bucky, what are you saying?”

“I talked to T’Challa maybe an hour ago, after I had the nightmare.  He’s going to…  He’s going to help me.”

Steve doesn’t get it.  He gives a tentative smile.  “Okay, that’s good.”

“I’m going back under, Steve.”

It’s silent.  Absolutely, completely, _deeply_ silent.  Bucky can’t even hear his own heartbeat.  He feels like he can hear Steve’s, though.  It’s pounding, pounding hard and fast.  And Steve stands there, face lax with confusion, color draining from his cheeks, mouth open, eyes huge.  “Bucky…  No.  No, no.  Come on.  Don’t – that’s not the answer.  That’s not the answer!”

He has to say this.  “It _is_ the answer.”

“No, Bucky!  Come on!  We can – we can figure this out!  There’s another way!”

He has to _do_ it.  And he has to make Steve understand.  “There isn’t, Steve.  This is the only way.  I’ve been talking to the doctors here.  They did some tests.  There’s damage to my brain, a lot of it.  The triggers and the programming and everything HYDRA did…  It’s down deep.  They can’t treat it.  Not now.”

“Then we’ll go somewhere else!  We’ll try something else!”

“There’s nothing else.  Nobody else.  This is the most technologically advanced civilization on the planet, and they can’t help me.”  Steve blanches and averts his eyes.  “And I can’t be a threat to people.  I can’t.  All of this happened because of me.  Maybe it wasn’t my fault, but it still happened.”  _I still did it._   “It can’t ever happen again.  I’m dangerous.”

“No, Bucky, that’s not true!”

“Yes, it is.  It is, Steve.  You know it is.”

“It’s giving up!  It’s running away!  It’s goddamn giving up!”

That hurts, but he has to be strong.  “It’s the best thing.” 

Steve begins to panic.  “No, no.  No.  I just got you back.  I just got you back!  Please, please, _please_ don’t do this!  Please don’t leave me again.  Please, Bucky!”  He’s shaking his head, far beyond cracking.  Breaking.   _Falling apart_.  Bucky fights harder, harder than he’s fought in seventy years, not to do the same.  “Please don’t do this…”

“I have to.  It’s too dangerous.  I’ll hurt you.”

“No, you won’t!  Bucky, you won’t hurt me!  And even if you did, it’s okay.  I’ll heal.  I’ll–”

“I _won’t_ hurt you, Steve.  I love you.”  He says that, hears himself say it, and it’s right.  It’s real.  Steve stares, eyes pooling with tears, and Bucky goes on, bolder and more certain.  “I love you so much.  You don’t even know.  As all this comes back, I don’t know where you end and I start.  That’s how much you’re inside me.  Even when I didn’t know anything else, even when they stripped everything that was _me_ out of my head, I knew you.  I knew _you_.”  Steve shakes his head weakly, wanting to deny, but he can’t seem to find his voice.  “I can’t have you destroy your life for me.  You gave up being Captain America.  You gave up your friends.”

“I did,” Steve cries, “but I did it _for you!_ ”

“And I don’t want that.  I don’t want you to lose one more thing because of me.  They took everything away from us.  _Everything._   I couldn’t stop them.  I didn’t have any choices.  Now…  this is my choice.”

For a second, it seems as though Steve will argue more.  Rail against this.  Fight with everything he has, just like he has every other time he’s lost Bucky.  Going to war.  Following him to Europe.  Picking up the shield.  Throwing it down once.  _Twice,_ this time for good.

But he doesn’t fight.  He searches Bucky’s face, his eyes teeming with tears.  It’s starting to sink into him, become undeniable.  _He’s_ the one who’s defeated.  Submitting.  Giving up.  “Bucky…  Bucky, why?”

Bucky comes closer, setting his flesh and blood hand to Steve’s cheek.  He has to be the Bucky Steve loves.  So he smiles faintly, brushing Steve’s tears away with his thumb.  “Because this is the right thing to do.”  Again that gives Steve pause, and his eyes are still searching.  Staring.  Wordlessly pleading.  Bucky gives another smile, a stronger one, and nods.  “It’s alright,” he promises.  “It really is.”

Steve finally loses it.  All of his surety and confidence.  All of his determination.  That strong façade shatters completely.  Bucky’s heart breaks with it, and he cups the back of Steve’s head and threads his fingers through his hair and pulls him close.  Steve chokes on a sob.  It’s muffled by Bucky’s right shoulder, warm skin and firm muscles and flesh.  Steve buries his face there, his arms coming up and around Bucky, and Bucky holds him in place as best he can with one arm.  Hushes him.  It’s enough.  “It’s alright.  It’s alright.”

Steve clutches him so hard it hurts.  He can’t seem to speak, but he doesn’t need to.  Bucky closes his eyes and breathes and lets him cry.

It takes a while for Steve to wear himself out.  Bucky wonders if he’s cried since he woke up in the future.  If he’s grieved.  Probably not.  They’re the same like that.  When he finally quiets, Bucky lets him lean back.  He slides his hand forward, holding his cheek.  Steve blinks tiredly, still sinking into his pain, and Bucky...  Bucky kisses him.

It’s been seventy years.  A lifetime.  Steve’s afraid for a moment.  Bucky is, too.  That thing inside him is warm and right, though, so much so that he’s losing himself in the first thing that’s felt good in forever.  He kisses harder, losing himself in that, in the warmth and comfort and mounting familiarity.  Different times, different places, different bodies…  It doesn’t matter.  Kissing Steve is kissing Steve, and this feels like home.

Steve opens his mouth to him, and Bucky takes.  Steve’s hands come up to his face, brushing across unshaven cheeks, pulling him closer.  Everything disappears.  The horrors of the past.  The uncertain future.  This strange place and cold world in which they don’t belong.  They’re stumbling to Steve’s bed a moment later, clumsy and tangled up together.  Steve staggers down first.  Neither of them is willing to let the other go, fumbling and grasping, pulling and dragging.  Breaths are shared, lips locked together, fingers yanking at clothes.  Bucky scrabbles at Steve’s t-shirt, getting it up and over his head, and seeing him like this…  It’s like the memories.  The good dreams.  The dark woods of Germany.  Outside Azzano.  In their apartment at home.  Big or small, Steve always has been and always will be beautiful.  Bucky stares at the miles of unmarked pale flesh, the perfect swell of muscles up his stomach and chest, the broad shoulders and trim hips.  It’s perfect, like he remembers.  Even the marks from the fight are gone.  He trails a hand up Steve’s belly as it heaves with breath, remembers laying lightly on Steve’s chest in their apartment, listening to his heart’s uneven pace and his lungs struggling.  He remembers laying in their tent during the war, too, every time he could, just losing himself when Steve’s heart pumped right and his lungs worked right and thanking God for that.  Thanking God for Steve, Steve just as he is now, safe and hale and strong, unmarked and unchanged.

But Steve’s staring at his left shoulder where his sleeve is pinned up, where his arm used to be.  Steve’s staring at the damage.  His cheeks are red, his lips kiss-swollen but wet with tears and quivering.  “Bucky…”

Bucky lays down beside him.  It’s awkward without his arm – things aren’t the same, not really, no matter how much he wants it to be – but he makes it work.  He claims Steve’s mouth again, hot and deep but tender, caressing Steve’s chest as they lay back.  When he pulls back for a breath, he smiles.  “It’s alright,” he whispers again.  Again and again.  “It’s alright, baby doll.”

Steve whimpers desperately at that, at what Bucky used to call him when he was young and sweet-talking and full of smooth charm.  It comes so easily, and it’s pure and sweet, like the secret it used to be.  Bucky smiles.  “Let me…  Can I?”  Steve’s canting his hips up in a wordless affirmation, and Bucky trails his hand down his belly to his jeans.  It’s been so, so long, and Steve’s trembling hard.  Bucky hushes him again, serene with his mind quiet for the first time in forever.  This is what he remembers.  Steve beneath him.  Steve all around him.  Steve beautiful and giving and _his._   “Easy, Stevie,” he says into Steve’s mouth.  “Easy.  I got you.”

“Buck…”

“I got you.”

They don’t speak again.  Bucky’s safe here, far from the nightmares and the programming, and the madness.  Steve’s safe, too.  Safe in his arms.  Bucky fumbles at his belt, at the button of his jeans, at the zipper.  He gets Steve’s pants off and his boxers, too.  Touches him.  Steve shivers, groans and sobs at once, and Bucky kisses him calm.  Steve’s arms encircle him, trap him close, rocking his hips against Bucky’s clothed thigh where it pushes between his own, quivering harder as Bucky strokes him.  Bucky watches Steve’s eyes, watches the pleasure melt away the pain.  Another memory comes to him, one of the sweetest yet.  _“I don’t have anything to give you,”_ he hears himself say back then.  It was right after their first time making love.  It happened in Steve’s old place, where a flurry of teasing kisses and exploring touches led to Steve in his lap with both of them naked.  They were sated, spent, languidly enjoying the moments after, tangled up together on Steve’s lumpy bed.  There was fear for what they’d done but not enough to make them regret it.  Never.  This was it.  This was who they were.  _Steve and Bucky.  Bucky and Steve.  Together._

And Bucky held him tight.  _“I don’t have anything to give you, Stevie.  Not anything you deserve.”_  

Steve sighed, burrowed close, and breathed loose and easy.  _“Don’t need anything, Buck.  Nothing more than you.”_

Steve cries out now, whining raggedly, muscles coiled tight, body twisting with Bucky’s touch.  Bucky closes his eyes against his tears, kissing Steve’s forehead, his nose, his jaw, his lips, his neck, nuzzling there and touching him faster and harder.  It all comes back like he never lost it, like his memories were never stolen.  And it doesn’t take much, hardly anything at all after all this time, before Steve’s panting and whimpering and letting go.  Bucky kisses him and hushes him through it, gentling his touch, easing him down the other side.  “It’s alright,” he’s whispering again.  “It’s alright, baby doll.”

The silence comes back.  It’s softer now, tender and tired.  Steve’s limp against him, breathing quietly, shivering slightly with receding pleasure.  Once he gathers his senses and catches his breath and blinks away his tears, he reaches for Bucky’s sweatpants.

Bucky kisses him gently, catching his hand and lightly pushing it away.  “No, it’s alright.”

“What about you?”

Bucky smiles comfortingly, lifting his hand to his lips and kissing each of his knuckles.  “This isn’t about me.  You don’t need to give me anything.”  Steve watches him with hazy eyes.  The pain’s coming back.  Bucky can see that.  This isn’t enough, not nearly, not after all this time and pain and fear.  Not after being separated and tortured and turned against each other.  But it’s all they have.

 _For now._   “You don’t need to give me anything,” Bucky says again, staring into Steve’s eyes, “except for this.  I need you to promise me that you’ll keep going.  Keep fighting.”

Steve’s face crumples.  “Bucky…”

“You’re going to handle it.  It’s not forever, I swear to you.  It’s not.  They’ll find a way to fix me.  I know they will.  And you and me…  No matter what, we find each other.”

A soft sob escapes Steve’s lips, and he curls around Bucky’s side, spooning his hip and closing his eyes.  “I can’t do this,” he confesses, dropping his face and nuzzling into Bucky’s neck to hide fresh tears.  “I can’t.”

“Yes, you can.  We both can.  It’s alright, sweetheart.”

“It’s not, Buck.”

“Shh…  Sure, it is.  It is.  You’re strong, Stevie.  Always have been.  So much stronger than anyone knows.”

“You don’t know…  I wanted…  I thought if I had you, nothing else would matter.  If I had you, I’d know what to do.  Who to be.  I don’t know who I am without you.  I’m not who I was.  I can’t go back!  I can’t…”

“You don’t have to.”  Steve shivers, and Bucky draws him as close as he can.  “Captain America?  The guy with the shield and the star-spangled theme song?  Him I read about in a museum.”  There’s a wet brush of air, a grunt against Bucky’s neck.  It’s a chuckle.  Bucky smiles and kisses the crown of Steve’s head.  “But I don’t need anything to know who you are.  It’s my damn fault for taking so long to see that.  I don’t need anything to know you.  You’re Steve.”   He lets himself believe, lets himself feel.  Lets himself hope.  “And I love you.”

* * *

Dawn comes.  They’re back in the medical ward.  Bucky sits on another hospital bed, dressed again in white.  He’s clean.  He’s calm.  And he’s ready.  He feels good in a way he can’t explain.  There’s pain, of course.  Pain in his arm.  Pain in his head.  Pain in his heart.  But he’s okay with it.  During the night, a night spent kissing Steve, learning Steve’s body anew, holding Steve and watching Steve sleep, he expected he’d have second thoughts.  He didn’t and he doesn’t now.  And he expected the Winter Soldier to ruin this, these last peaceful moments he has with the one he loves.  But that didn’t happen, either.  Dawn arrived, bright and pretty, and he still knows this is the right choice.

Around him, the doctors work to prepare him for cryostasis.  The pod sits on the other side of the room.  It also is clean and white, so far removed from the ugly, black hell in which HYDRA had put him to sleep so many times before.  Steve glances at the chamber as he hesitantly comes closer.  He hardly looks like he broke apart the night before.  The deep contusions on his face are still faint, lingering marks, but the serum made the bruises on his throat completely vanish.  It’s also erased the redness of his eyes, the pallor of his face.  It can’t take away the pain, though.  He’s struggling with it.  He’s trying not to, trying so hard for Bucky’s sake.  Bucky whispered promises to his sleeping body last night.  _“I’d die for you.  Do anything to take away how much you hurt.  Anything, Steve.  I’d do anything to make this right for us.  That’s why I’m doing this.  I have to get better.  I have to.  I can’t ever hurt you again.”_

Steve’s smiling, though.  He’s still horrible at lying, and Bucky can see right through it, but it’s good enough.  “You sure about this?” he asks.  It’s thinly veiled, a last attempt to find a way out of what’s to come.  He knows Steve knows this is right.  Steve said it before, when they lay in bed together and watched the sun rise.  _“I know why you’re doing this.  And I know it’s right.  I know it.  But I can’t…  Christ, Bucky…”_   Bucky kissed his tears away and made more promises.  He’ll keep every one of them.

Starting with the one he’s making himself.  He’s not helpless.  He’s not just a victim or a weapon.  He’s not running anymore.  He’s fighting the best way he can.  “I can’t trust my own mind,” he says.  “So until they figure out how to get this stuff out of my head…”

“I know.  It’s for the best.”

Bucky gives a weak smile.  “For everybody.”  _For you.  For me.  For us._

Steve nods.  He reaches out, sets his hand firmly on Bucky’s good shoulder again.  They stare at each other.  There’s one more promise to make.  “This isn’t the end of the line, Steve,” Bucky swears.

Steve’s lips turn in the slightest smile.  “I know.”

The doctors finish with the IV, with the equipment around the pod.  One of them calls him over, and Steve helps Bucky stand.  The medicine to help him sleep is already making him woozy.  Bucky puts his good arm around Steve’s neck, leaning into his solid, warm strength, and heads to the pod.

They get him inside.  Some of the nurses and doctors work with the touch screens.  Others strap him in place gently.  One asks if he’s okay, and he says he is.  He is.  He looks at Steve, Steve who’s holding back tears.  There’s another memory coming to him as the drugs take him down and he starts to drift into the darkness again.  This one’s good, too.  A starry night and the World Expo and Steve, calm with purpose outside the recruitment center.  Bucky’s going.  Steve’s finding his own way.  Fate pulling them apart.

 _For now._   “Punk,” Bucky calls, grinning.

Steve looks surprised, but then he can’t stop his own grin.  “Jerk.”

The pod’s glass cover slides into place.  The cold comes.  It’s not so bad.  The last thing he sees is Steve’s blue eyes, watching him for every moment he’s awake.  _Steve’s blue eyes._

He goes to sleep.  He hopes he dreams.

* * *

It’s not supposed to end this way.

That’s the only thing Steve’s certain of now.  He’s standing in one of the Wakandan palace’s many observation rooms, a large stretch of floor to ceiling windows before him.  He stares out into the mist.  Everything has that sort of surreal blurriness again, only now he’s not sure if he’s waking up from the nightmare or tumbling down into it.  The jungle’s far below, a maze of twisted trees and tangled leaves, and he really feels like he’s falling.  It’s been hours since Bucky went into cryosleep, and he hasn’t been able to bring himself to do much of anything other than stare.  He’s tired.  Hurt.  Frustrated.  Scared and worried and alone.  So goddamn _alone_.  Nothing mattered now.  Not really.  Not everything he gave up, everything he sacrificed.  His friends.  His shield.  His heart and soul.  Bucky’s gone, and for the first time in his life, he just wants to quit.  Even waking up seventy years in the future didn’t leave him so lost.  He had Bucky, found Bucky, saved Bucky, but in the end, he has nothing.

It’s not supposed to be like this.

He breathes, sticks his hands in his pockets.  Stares.  Blinks.  Breathes again.  Nothing changes.  All their lives they’ve had to hide who they are.  How they feel for each other.  All their lives they’ve had to be careful, be discreet.  Then the war happened.  And Bucky died.  And he died.  Woke up here and now.  Seeing the Winter Soldier on the causeway in DC changed his world, but no matter how frightened he was, no matter how dark and twisted and damaged Bucky was, he always figured there was a way to bring him back.  There had to be a way, and as long as he kept going, kept fighting, he’d find it.  And finding that…  Well, he knows now that it wasn’t entirely selfless.  Finding that meant finding himself.  _Home.  Love._   Everything.

It’s not supposed to hurt _this much._

But he breathes and blinks and tries to be numb.  That’s all that’s left now.  Detachment.

Quiet footsteps come from his left.  He knows it’s T’Challa without even turning to look.  The king walks to his side and stops.  They hardly know each other, but he can feel T’Challa’s concern as the other man appraises him.  At the very least he should express some gratitude for everything.  For saving them.  For bringing them here.  For affording Bucky a safe haven and the chance for some sort of recovery.  His mother taught him to be grateful no matter what.  “Thank you for this.”

T’Challa stands and stares out the window as well.  “Your friend and my father,” he says.  “They were both victims.  If I can help one of them find peace…”

Steve knows he should appreciate that there’s still good in this world, that after all this, there’s still fairness and compassion.  But it’s too hard to manage.  And his muscles are hard and his voice his hard and his heart is even harder.  He turns to T’Challa.  “You know if they find out he’s here, they’ll come for him.”  That scares him more than he’s willing to show.  HYDRA.  The US government.  The UN.  The Avengers, or what’s left of them under Ross’ heel.  He has more enemies now than he’s ever had before.

T’Challa sees everything he can’t admit, though, and offers a small smile.  “Let them try.”

That’s more of a comfort than it should be.  The two of them stare out over the jungle, the might and power of Wakanda all around them, a misty, mysterious embrace, and Steve relaxes just a bit.  Bucky’s safe here, as safe as he can be.  Maybe it makes no sense, but Steve trusts T’Challa.  Steve trusts enough.

“It is not easy to lose so much,” T’Challa comments after a quiet moment.

Steve sighs and finally looks down.  “We’ve all lost too much.”

“I told your friend that it was never our intention that the Accords fracture your family.  I regret very much that you lost your home.”

It doesn’t matter now.  “Not sure that I ever had one.”

“You did.  Stark…  Before I came for you in Russia, I brought Zemo to him.  He looked like a broken man, Captain.  And he told me to find you.  To help you.”  T’Challa shakes his head.  “There is no doubt in my mind he cares for you.”

That takes Steve aback.  But he can’t feel much for it, nothing more than empty, unfulfilling bitterness.  “What’s done is done.”  Suddenly standing still is utterly repulsive, even though he’s been doing it all day.  “Excuse me.”  He turns to go.

He barely makes it a few feet away.  “Captain Rogers,” T’Challa calls.  Steve stops, hurts so much he nearly falters.  He turns.  The king watches him with regretful eyes.  “You do not need to run.  They will come for you, too, and I’m not certain I can protect you if you leave.”

Honestly, he hasn’t thought about _what_ he’s going to do.  Sure, leaving has rumbled around his thoughts these last couple of hours, but it hasn’t been more than a distant concept.  The deadened apathy makes everything so damn distant.  Still, the second T’Challa says it, he knows that’s what he’s doing.  What he has to do.  T’Challa knew it before he did.  “I don’t need your protection.  And this isn’t your fight anymore.  You’ve done enough.”

“So have you,” T’Challa responds kindly.  “There’s no sense in facing what lies ahead alone.”

Steve thinks about that, thinks as much as he can with his heart broken and his mind numb.  Then he turns and walks away again.

Before he knows it, he’s back in their suite.  He stands in the living area.  There’s no one else there.  The silence is deafening, the emptiness consuming.  He sighs, looking around, but there’s no sign that Bucky was ever there.  _A ghost story._   And like a ghost, Bucky’s disappeared again.  Even in his bedroom, the bed’s made, empty and idle.  No sign of the love they shared there, the kisses and caresses and pleasure, the comfort and promises.  Nothing’s left.  And it’s not fair.  There’s _nothing_ fair about it.  He knows Bucky was suffering.  He could see it.  He’d have to be blind not to.  For days on end, he _felt_ it and knew he couldn’t help.  Not with that.  And he knows this is right, the only option, because asking Bucky to weather one more torture, one more torment, is unconscionable.  He’s suffered enough, more than anyone could ever ask.  This was his choice, _Bucky’s choice_.  After seventy years, he deserved the dignity of it.  Who is Steve to take that from him? 

Peggy’s words echo in his head.  _“He damn well thought you were worth it.”_

Knowing that, knowing _all of that…_ It’s not enough.

_It can’t end this way!_

“Goddamn it,” Steve moans.  “Goddamn it!”  He’s staggering, going down onto the couch, burying his face in his hands.  The storm of emotions he’s barely been keeping at bay all day is threatening, pounding on his restraint, beating on him as badly and viciously as any bully ever has.  As the Red Skull or Crossbones or Iron Man has.  As the Winter Soldier has.  His bones ache, his lungs seize, his innards clench, and he wants to scream.  He’s shaking so violently.  There’s no air to breathe.  No point in breathing it.  His heart is hammering against his sternum, and his fingers rake into his hair, and he’s choking down a scream.  _Bucky’s gone._   The thought pulses through him, unending, _never ending._   _Bucky’s gone.  Bucky’s gone.  Bucky’s gone._

_I couldn’t save him._

There’s no point in fighting now.

Still…  As he sits there, crushed into the couch under the weight of it all, crumbling and shattering and losing himself all over again, he thinks of Bucky’s smile.  That special one he always had.  Bucky’s knowing smirk.  He only ever gave it to Steve.  He saw it last night, and it was like finally being warm after years suffering in the ice.  It’s like the sun.  It’s like that smile was _made_ for Steve.  _“You gonna tough it out, Rogers?”_

 _“Don’t need you to fight my battles, Barnes.”_   The memory comes quick, and he loses himself in it.  They were walking home from another alleyway brawl.  This time he picked a fight more than put himself in the middle of one.  The first of many enlistment cards stamped “4F” was burning its way through his jacket pocket, and he was smarting from that more than from all his bruises and bumps combined.  His ribs ached and his knuckles were sore and his right eye was nearly swollen shut.  He was barely walking but stubbornly refusing to let Bucky carry him, even though getting up the four flights of steps to his mother’s apartment was going to be hell.  Bucky kept trying to steady him, pull him closer, take some of his weight.  _“Get off.”_

_“Steve, come on.”_

_“I said get off!”_

_“Why’re you always so full of piss and vinegar?  Huh?  Let me help you, for Pete’s sake.”_

_“Don’t need your help.”_

_“No, you don’t.  But I wanna help you.”_

_“Why?”_

_“Because you’re always getting into trouble,”_ Bucky answered.  Steve stopped and watched him smirk that smirk.  _“I gotta be there to make sure you get out of it.  I gotta make sure you get home again.  And I gotta make sure you keep going.”_

Steve opens his eyes.  Sees the empty suite.  The paper on the table.  The pen.  And he can hear Bucky’s voice, clear as day.  _“I need you to promise me that you’ll keep going.”_

_Keep going._

He knows what he needs to do.

It doesn’t take long at all for him to write down what he needs to say to Tony.  He gets it all out, why he did what he did, why he feels how he feels.  What he hopes Tony will understand.  And he apologizes for turning a blind eye, for not letting himself see the truth about what Bucky did.  He doesn’t know if it’ll be enough to mend the bridges between them, but he hopes.  He can’t be angry or bitter.  Not anymore.  _I know you’re doing what you believe in, and that’s all any of us can do.  It’s all any of us should._   Bucky reminded him of that.  He hopes it’s a start to making things right.  _An olive branch._   He thinks of Tony’s smile and smiles himself as he signs the letter.  One day they’ll be okay.  He knows they will be.

After that, with the letter sealed in its envelope and stuffed into the black jacket he’s put on, he walks through the dark and silent hallways.  His head’s full again, making plans, knowing he needs to find supplies.  Clothes.  Transportation.  Food.  A pair of cellphones.  But first his feet are sure and steady as they lead him to the medical ward.  So’s his heart.  The lights are dimmed inside.  It’s quiet, empty, but that’s okay.  He goes right up to the pod.

Through the frozen glass, he can see Bucky.  He’s calm and sleeping, just as he should be.  He looks peaceful.  Beautiful.  Steve watches him for a long time, and all the pain inside stirs again.  He doesn’t let it get the best of him, though.  He’s better than that.  “I’m going to handle it,” he says.  “I’m going to get them all back.  I’ll be back as soon as I do.”  Bucky doesn’t answer, but Steve doesn’t need it.  He doesn’t need anything more than a promise.  _It’ll be alright.  I’ll be alright.  I can wait.  I can wait forever if I have to._

Steve smiles to himself.  A few tears escape his eyes, and he lets them fall.  “And so it goes, right, Buck?”  He kisses his palm, presses it to the bitingly cold glass over Bucky’s face.  The icy fractals sting his fingertips, but the frost melts and recedes.  And it hurts, but he’s not letting that stop him.  He’s not letting anything stop him from doing what needs to be done.  Not now.  Not ever.  “I love you.  Whenever you wake up, whenever you’re ready, I’ll be here.”

The heat of his hand stays long after he’s gone.

**THE END**


End file.
